“I am moving if Trump is elected.” I’ve heard this one before, I’ve felt this before. I did consider moving abroad in 2000, 2001, and then in 2004. The feeling faded. I didn’t move in the face of it all. It’s an odd choice to make. Allow me to explain. 

You see, I did eventually move. I moved away a month before Obama was inaugurated. I did not move here for political reasons, I moved here to be with my wife. Here is Warsaw, Poland. I have lived in Warsaw for seven years. When I am asked if I like living here, which is all the time, the answer varies on the day I am having. But I think I can help you with the answer to the question, “Should I move?”

 10 Things You Will Need to Come to Grips With: 

1. Distance 

To begin with the obvious. You are going to be somewhere else, which makes it hard-to-impossible to do anything about what happens “back home.” You will have social media, for sure, but nothing replaces being there.

2. Us and them 

Get used to not having the majority point of view. Get used to “what is assumed” to be wholly different from what you know in the core of your being. Get used to being a minority, which can mean a lot of different things depending on where you land. (In my case, I moved to a near monoculture, so I am easily marked as foreign.)

3. Citizenship

Brace yourself for the immigration process. You will be asked to prove you are you over and over again, defend the fact that you are an upstanding citizen, and maybe even be asked to explain by what right you are even there. They may show up at your door and inspect your personal items, send police over to inspect your documents, ask invasive questions during interviews, and will be guaranteed to work ineffectively and passively threaten your very existence and well-being in your new place of residence.

4. Cultural translation 

Prepare yourself for being constantly misunderstood and for not understanding a bulk of what happens around you. If you move to a country where English is not the first language, then prepare for that eventuality to exist tenfold. You will sprain your wrist from all the headslaps.

5. Unknown unknowns 

You really don’t know what you don’t know. You will find out.

6. A new political reality 

This may be the hardest point for me to ignore my own situation. In Poland, the newly elected government has been chipping away at the country’s constitution since they came into power in the fall, seen the country’s economic rating get downgraded as a result, and also been censured by the European Union. Some of this has been on the back of fear-mongering regarding refugees, which as a foreigner, is bound to make you feel anxious, especially when you are popularly marked as “Italian” and thus dark/Mediterranean/from where the “problem” comes. No matter where you go, you must accept the fact that there is a legal and political superstructure with which to come to terms.

7. Token American

You will be marked as American and often asked to explain why your country works in some way or another. You will implicitly represent all that is deemed wrong about your country of origin. Again, if you are in a country where English is not the first language, you will be boiled down to one element—“native speaker.” That is your value.

8. Getting a job

You will find yourself having to defend why you as a foreigner should get a job over a national. You will be signing contracts that you may not completely understand, and you will be engaging a set of legal questions before you can even take that job.

9. Living 

There is an assortment of daily tasks that you now could sleepwalk through that will become major headaches. Over time you will eventually master them, but not in the beginning.

10. Convenience and customer service

It is an American idea. Full stop.

Looking at this list, you may think that I am complaining. That I am merely projecting my own anxieties. That I must live a closed existence to not want to embrace these challenges. That you are different and open to adventure. Well, this is where I remind you that you are not running to something but running away from something. I know about 12 Americans living abroad in countries as diverse Poland, Finland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Turkey, Kuwait, and Singapore. They all made the choice to move. They have accepted to some degree or another the challenges I have listed.

What I would recommend instead is a projection of what I would like to be able to do myself: I would encourage those who are already packing to re-focus that energy into political organizing. If this is your line in the sand, then defend that line; don’t use it as an excuse to give up. 

With all the love in my heart I say to you: Don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.

Matthew Chambers is the author of Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics and the editor of Hearts and Minds: US Cultural Management in 21st Century Foreign Relations. A Buffalo native, he currently lives and works in Poland.